When you’re a homebrewer, sometimes the product is greater than the sum of its parts and sometimes it’s a mess you pour down the drain. Three weeks ago I bottle my Harvest Ale, a lovely dark amber spiced ale made…
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Brewing Stockpile
Now I know how the squirrel feels. With the warmth of summer still hanging in the air like the last note of a concert before the applause, the days growing darker but the cold not yet drawing the heat away.…
Brew Daze
Apologies for the punny title, I was inspired by a liquor store near my office called, sadly, “Happy Daze Liquors”. It seems like a name that would’ve been funny during the Great Depression but now stirs up the tut-tutters. What’s…
Stocking the Closet
It must be one of the most primary and ingrained feelings: the sense of contentment you get from being well-stocked with provisions. Tens of thousands of years ago it was the sight of smoked mammoth meat stacked in the back…
Bubble, Bubble, Toil, and Guzzle
Home brewing is a hedonist’s dream. Whatever your taste, your required quantity, your preferred bottle shape, it’s all under your control, o puppetmaster. But homebrewing is a hell for the impatient. You think once fermenting is done that you can…
Posted in Brewing Tagged with: abbey ale, beer, brewing, english ale, fermenting, home brewing, honey rosemary saison, stout, yeast
Let Your Beer Grow Up
A little age isn’t a bad thing. Take a look at the smoked wheat after it had some extra time in the fridge to settle: And it’s not just the color that improved. The flavors really matured, blended, and mellowed.…
Posted in Brewing Tagged with: ale, beer, bottling, brewing, grains, home brewing, mash, racking cane, stout
Lemongrass Wheat Beer
New beer is on the way! Last weekend I made a batch of wheat ale and decided to go off-recipe and try my own thing. Yes, this is the part of the story where Uncle F#*k-Up makes an appearance. But…
Posted in Brewing Tagged with: beer, cardamom, child harbat, coriander, home brewing, lemongrass, mash, toca boca, wheat ale
Plus One Beer, Minus One Chicken
Life’s about balance, right? Yesterday I got to bring the beer I’d brought to life a little over a month ago. I was so excited to taste it that I forgot to refrigerate it, something I only noticed halfway through.…
Making it Yourself
It’s one of the oldest themes of my blog: handmade. This weekend I went back to those roots, finding simple joy in the handcrafted pleasures of…oh, who am I kidding? UncleF#*k-Up finally bottled the beer after an extra week of…
Posted in Home Improvement, Parenting Tagged with: beer, CH, home brewing, leprechauns, parenting, uncle
Making Beer, Part Two
Once you’ve made beer, what do you do with the grains? If you run your own CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) you can use tanker trucks to deliver thousands of tons of spent grain mash to your metropolis of pigs…
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